Top of the Rock skyline view
— — the one deck where the Empire State stays in the picture.
Not only on a wall.
“Seventy floors above Rockefeller Plaza, the city opens in three directions at once. South to the Empire State Building, which from no other observation deck stands cleanly above the skyline. North to Central Park, a green rectangle cut sharp into the grid. The wind reads cooler here than the street suggests, and the talk on the deck quiets when the lights come on. The view is the building's argument and it makes it well, ninety seconds at a time, for whoever steps out of the elevator. from the studio
Top of the Rock skyline view, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Top of the Rock is the observation deck on the 67th, 69th, and 70th floors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the 70-story Art Deco tower completed in 1933 as the centerpiece of the Rockefeller Center complex. The deck closed in 1986 and reopened in 2005 after a renovation by the Tishman Speyer ownership. From the open-air 70th-floor terrace, 850 feet above Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building reads cleanly to the south and Central Park reads cleanly to the north — a sightline no other Manhattan deck offers.
The deck holds two distinct light windows. The first is the half hour before sunset, when the west-facing glass curtain wall of One Vanderbilt catches gold and the avenues read as long copper lines. The second is the hour after, when the office towers light their floors one bay at a time and Central Park goes flat black against the lit grid around it. Photographers favor an arrival 45 minutes before sunset; the deck's timed-entry tickets are released in 15-minute slots.
Entry is by timed ticket from the 50th Street concourse of Rockefeller Center, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The elevator ride to the 67th floor takes under a minute and runs against a small light-show ceiling. Three levels of deck are open: the enclosed 67th, the partially enclosed 69th, and the open-air 70th with full waist-high glass. The deck is open daily, typically 9 a.m. to midnight, with last entry around 11 p.m. The new SkyLift platform opened in 2023 above the 70th floor.